To ask you about the worst mistake you've made at work?

[800caloriesofwine]

Terrible, terrible day.
Please tell me the worst mistakes you've made in the workplace.
Mine were sending £6,000 of dental implants to the wrong dentist, two days before they were due to be placed in someone's mouth.
Also writing the wrong patient down as dead.

Answered the phone at work and a caller asked to speak to a colleague but was really rude.

I patched him through saying "this rude c* wants to speak to you".

She called me afterwards and said "that 'rude c*' was my husband..."

I was so mortified that I can't even write out the word in full and I swear like a trooper

I couldn't apologise enough

@Zug2 sorry to hear you got cancer, I hope your treatment has been successful.

In my case the patient who had leukaemia was already being treated for it so made no real difference to them. It was over 20 years ago when our systems were more basic and user error wasn’t always picked up as quickly. Hopefully that sort of mistake wouldn’t happen now.

My fellow store manager did lock the safe properly the night the store got raided. 30k was in it

That smells like an inside job!

I’ll never ever forget and it still haunts me, was a new shiny PCSO and a blind man asked how to get a well known land mark which was well out of the London Borough we were in, I walked him to the bus stop, waited for the bus, told the driver where he was going and when it got to the bus garage could he put him on the next bus and tell the driver to help him. Stood at the bus stop feeling like yes this why I joined the net to help people, carried on my patrol and about 5 minutes later is dawned on me there is a pub literally 10 minute walk from where we were with the same name as the land mark, I felt absolutely fucking awful, the poor man was now going on a cross county adventure, taking 2 buses to stand outside a landmark when all he wanted was bloody pint.

The second thing I done, sitting in the office one early turn, 4 desks in a square right top my sergeant, next to him my friend, I’m opposite her and then my other colleague, it’s about 6.30am, my sergeant is eating chicken legs there is no tomorrow. I sent my friend opposite...we know where this going and email making some personal remarks. It pings up saying delivered to him, I went as white as a sheet, my colleague said are you ok you look peaky? Sergeant got up to the loo, I was in between een hysterical laughter and panic. I told my friend to distract him lie, cry, spray herself with CS gas if she had too whilst I frantically tried to recall the email, I successfully did.

Another email one again, sent a chief superintendent who you always call Sir, my friend had a very similar name and we used to call each stupid nicknames well his was lovingly known as big balls. I sent an email saying alright Big balls, long time no speak, hope all is good, xxx I logged on after 3 days off and saw an unfamiliar name on my emails, read the reply, replied with my nickname and no much happening thanks for asking, hope all is good with you and keeping safe out on your patrols. Love Chief superintendent real name I almost died, literally felt the life fell out my boots. Hilarious now, not so much at the time.

First few months on the job, big mail shot (in the days of snail-mail) with questionnaire for informing government policy development.

I put 200 empty but addressed envelopes down on the only blank piece of space in our busy shared office, intending to fill them later.

That empty space turned out to be... the out-tray...

First job, aged 17/18 and I had been there 1.5 years. Small company, one of the bosses wife's worked the accounts and she was a total bitch. She hated me and made no secret of it.

Anyway, she only worked like one day a week and wrote all the invoices, payments received, outstanding etc in a book and wouldn't use the computer. She would write "P" next to ones that were paid.

One day a client calls in asking for a receipt as he had paid his invoice. I look through the book and his details had "P" next to it, so I went ahead and sent him a receipt (basically an invoice with PAID written across it).

Turned out he hadn't paid, he basically chanced his luck by saying he did and requesting a receipt.

The boss went mental at me and his wife totally covered her own arse and claimed that P meant "pending payment" and that it was me who was wrong. I wasn't, all the time I had worked there P was paid. Of course, the boss believed his wife. He threatened to take the money from my pay but never did.

I left shortly after to a new job because she made it unbearable - although I did manage to screw them over by timing my resignation with two other members of staff!

@CoRhona

Answered the phone at work and a caller asked to speak to a colleague but was really rude.

I patched him through saying "this rude c* wants to speak to you".

She called me afterwards and said "that 'rude c*' was my husband..."

I was so mortified that I can't even write out the word in full and I swear like a trooper

I couldn't apologise enough

This one has really made me laugh, I'm sorry but that's hilarious!

@Coffeecak3, thank you for your kindness! the leukaemia worry was 23 years ago, it was the weekend after we got engaged, the fear was unreal.. The real deal was 10 years later, colon cancer, thankfully it was caught early.

Called my boss a ‘stupid man’ to my friend. Accidentally sent it to my boss. He had zero sense of humour.

Wasn’t actually my mistake but I discovered it. Was temping at a huge insurance company doing mainly data entry. The systems were so archaic that they looked like they were from an early 90s hacker movie (no exaggeration) despite it being the mid 00s. They also had stupid stages where you’d have to enter one lot of data into a screen, it would upload overnight, and then you could do the second part the next day. The nature of these phased systems meant you couldn’t skip ahead to phase 2/3 until you’d let the first phase upload overnight. So painstakingly slow!

One afternoon I was asked to cover another temp who was off sick by doing his second phase entry, he’d done phase one the day before. As I tried to pull the data up I realised none of the first stage stuff had pulled through yet which was odd.

I had a hunt around the other temp’s desk to see if he still had the file. I found it, and quickly realised he hadn’t uploaded the first phase. And then I found another. And another. And then it turned out he essentially hadn’t done anything, his desk drawers were bulging with all these unfinished files.

I felt awful inadvertently grassing him up but I couldn’t do my job without flagging it. It turned out he had felt overwhelmed with the pace of the work but rather than confide in his manager he’d just hidden the work and then offer to do the next phase so nobody noticed for weeks. He came back in the next day and was promptly let go. Poor lad! I really felt for him. Can’t imagine the stress of sitting on all that undone work for weeks hoping he could catch up before getting rumbled.

@DancingWithTheDevil it really wasn't at the time, it was awful and I was sure I was going to have an official complaint raised against me

But luckily she took it well!

[quote CoRhona]@DancingWithTheDevil it really wasn't at the time, it was awful and I was sure I was going to have an official complaint raised against me

But luckily she took it well![/quote]
I can only imagine your mortification at the time! I think I would have taken my coat and gone home for good....
Glad she took it well at least!

1. Couriered a confidential file to another office. Except the fucking things never arrived. Let's put it this way, it would have been a major national media thing if it had turned up in the wrong hands. DH actually had to drive to the UPS depot to bollock them and try and find it. Reader, we never did find that bugger. It seems to have disappeared from the face of the planet. To this day it's a mystery.
2. Printing off 20+ pages of sexy emails from my DH (then boyfriend) by accident on my boss's printer while he was on a conference call. He left them on my desk and said he didn't think they were meant for him. I love that man.
3. Not mine but the aforesaid boss: we had a management meeting at a historical building. All lovely. Unfortunately he got excited mid-presentation, put his shoulders against the wall and went to casually cross his legs. And kicked a hole in the priceless 16th century panelling. All credit to him - he apologised in person, he didn't get his PA (ie me) to do it.

@Ruth2009 yours is definitely my favourite!

@Healthyandhappy are you a really terrible nurse? Can barely read you posts as no punctuation.

Instead of pasting pertinent work data into the body of an email to a very senior, very difficult/bitchy colleague, I somehow copied and pasted the mumsnet post I had recently made. So this woman received a very personal story about going NC with my father, including details of my childhood abuse and his failure to deal with it.

She was a horrible colleague but to her credit, she never mentioned a word.

ArgumentativeAadvark

I didn't actually open any of them, it was all in a preview (we had a very weird email system) and I didn't open anything that hadn't already been opened. I think they had somehow sent me the archive of old mail.
I had a 14 hour shift to fill......

Left a Y8 class to collect some printing (LSA was in the room) and the department printer had broken again. Proceeded to call the machine every name under the sun, really went to town on the fucks and shitw etc. Walk back into the class to shocked laughter and an ashen faced LSA.

The LSA who was there to support the girl with a cochlear implant. The radio for which was unmuted and on a lanyard around my neck.

I'll never forget the time I wanted to be Churchill. I had a crazy overinflated sense of my own self importance and was the victim of childhood neglect and abuse.
One day, I fancied running the country. I was crap at it but I liked the fancy words and the big house and of course Churchill was on my side.
Sadly I killed thousands of people .

Wtf did crystal tree do?!

I work in accounts and accidentally posted an entire 150k invoice run to the wrong period. And so then all of the invoices needed individually crediting and reinvoicing. I was NOT popular that month 🤦‍♀️

I did work experience in a Co-Op department store in the mid nineties. I had asked for something journalist based but none available.

They put me in the appliances department.

I managed to sell a fridge freezer for a considerable amount less than it was priced at. They were offering 10% off all appliances but my maths is awful. I could have asked but the woman they put me with was a horrible old dragon who moaned about me being there constantly.
No wonder they looked happy when they left the shop